Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

I have written in this space before about the low crime rate in Ann Arbor and environs. People around here do not expect this kind of thing to happen. This is a pretty safe town.

Over the weekend, the local media ran a story about crime in Ann Arbor in light of the recent attacks. It turns out the number of major crimes in all categories is actually down in Ann Arbor this year. That's right. Rape is down. Last year, there were 30 rapes reported between January 1 and July 30. This year there have been 23.

There are two aspects of this statistic that catch most of us by surprise, whether they should or not. The first, of course, is that rape is down at a time when women are very concerned for their safety. The second is that there have 23 rapes this year, 21 of which did not make the news. Why? Because the vast majority of rapes, like the vast majority of other crimes, happen between people who know each other. They are not the stranger in the dark alley, they are the friend or acquaintance in the living room, or the ex-boyfriend, or the estranged husband, or the current boyfriend or husband.

Someone really has been lurking in dark alleys in Ann Arbor, and that really is bad, don't get me wrong. Right now, the risk of being raped at random is elevated. But the reason it's news is because it's a stranger in a dark alley. When this guy is caught, it will barely put a dent in the sexual assault rate in this town. We'll still be a town where 21 rapes occur, instead of 23.

And yet that other town, the one with 21 attacks, felt so much safer. By about the third attack, I was sitting down with my teenage daughter and talking frankly about the attacks and about her safety. I told her that we generally trust her common sense not to do something obviously dangerous, and we didn't let her walk around downtown alone at night anyway. But until this guy is caught, I told her, she needed to regard some things that common sense might say was safe as not being safe, including getting into an elevator with one other person at any time of day downtown.

Last Friday afternoon, I drove to an appointment downtown in the mid-afternoon. I drive to this area often and feel quite secure. But on Friday, I noticed myself having feeling very anxious about where I was going to park. Even as I got more nervous as I approached my destination, I was also aware that this made no sense. I always find parking. If there's nothing on the street, there's something in the structure half a block away. That's when it hit me. I wasn't nervous about finding a spot. I was afraid to park in the structure.

As soon as I realized this, I got mad. Mad that someone out there is singlehandedly holding me and every other woman in this community hostage. Mad that men in our society are so much less likely to be sexually assaulted, certainly by a stranger. Mad at a society that fails to see this as an issue that is, at its core, about sexism.
 
A week later, this guy has still not been caught. I'm still mad. I hope, however, that when he is caught I still remember to feel mad on behalf of those other 21 women, and that I'm not just relieved that I can go back to believing that this is something that happens to other people.


Note: I make it a usual practice never to post the picture of the perpetrator of a crime so as not to give them any "glory." However, since this one is still out there, and somebody must know who he is, I have posted the composite sketches above. Please, if you recognize him, call the AAPD at 734-794-6939.

Should the President Send Condolences When a Soldier Kills Himself?



Murder Victim Larry King

 We tend to pay attention to news stories that resonate with us in some personal way. You've heard me say that before. We follow them because we want to understand how something happened to someone else and whether it could happen to us, or to convince ourselves that it couldn't happen to us. Someone just like us winning the lottery gives us hope. Someone just like us being the victim of a crime scares us. We are them, and they are us.

Today in California, a trial will begin in a case that resonates with me on many levels.

Here's what everyone agrees on:  Larry King was 15 years old and living in a shelter in Oxnard, California. He was openly gay, and sometimes wore nail polish and what most would call "girls' clothes." In February, 2008, he was sitting in his classroom when an 8th grade classmate, aged 14, walked in, sat down behind him, took out a handgun and shot him twice, killing him, before getting up and walking out of the room. The only question in this trial was whether this was a premeditated anti-gay hate crime or a crime of passion, carried out by a kid who didn't know what to do about his "humiliation" that Larry King had said repeatedly he was attracted to him.

I think this defense, used in hopes of getting the shooter convicted of manslaughter instead of murder, is horrifying. What if the victim in this case was female, and had expressed attraction for a boy. Would we actually even entertain this as a mitigating factor which "caused" the boy to kill her? Would we allow the news coverage to refer to this as the shooter being "provoked?" The fact that a lawyer is even willing to try this defense strategy speaks volumes about the amount of prejudice that exists against people who are anything other than 100% certified heterosexual in our society.

I feel so strongly because I worked in schools for almost 20 years. I know something that the defense and the shooter apparently missed, which is that 15 year-old gay kids with flamboyant clothes and crushes on people of the same sex are, first and foremost, 15 year-old kids. They, like all kids that age, are doing the best they can figuring out what it means to be them in this world. Being 15 is hard enough without throwing being gay, and everyone's reactions to it, in there. For Larry King, throwing that in there got him kicked out of his house -- that's why he was living in a shelter.

I am the mother of a kid going into 8th grade next fall, so a piece of my reaction is also about my hopes and fears for my own children. I have a great deal of confidence that my child would not murder a classmate for any reason, and certainly not for their sexual orientation. I like to imagine that nothing about her would push another child's buttons so hard they felt justified in killing her. But that part's not as clear. I know my child and I know she has generally competent parents. I don't know other families nearly as well.

Apparently there are families out there, like the shooter in this case, who are exposing their children to drugs and violence day after day. There are kids, like this shooter, who are enamoured of white-supremacist teachings, have access to handguns, and find certain groups, or at least their behavior, so awful that they don't believe their members deserve to live. This doesn't make me feel better about the safety of my nice Jewish girl.

Larry King and his killer did not exist in a vacuum. Someone -- an adult or a child -- knew there was trouble. They probably thought it wasn't a big deal. Maybe they thought Larry brought it on himself.

It's been three years since Larry King was murdered. One thing I know for sure is that today, more than one parent is going to hear their kid or one of their kids' friends talk trash about the "f****t" they know, and how they want to "kick his a**." How many of those parents are going to step in and say we don't talk about other human beings that way, and how many are going to decide that kids are kids, and besides that kid they're talking about is a little fruity and probably deserves it? How many more Larry Kings are going to die, by murder or suicide, before we decide that maybe the problem isn't them, their clothes, their nail polish, or who they have a crush on? We have met the problem, and it is us.

Much of the cable news business has been obsessed, over the last few weeks, with the murder trial of the mother accused of killing Caylee Anthony. It was a very highly publicized case when it first broke, and the trial has had lots of salacious details and conspiracy theories to keep Nancy Grace and the like buys for the foreseeable future.

Branching off in a different direction, CNN.com ran a piece yesterday about the symptoms often experienced by jurors following these trials. According to the article, some jurors in murder trials,

report symptoms reminiscent of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. Whether you're in the courtroom or at home watching TV, repeated exposure to the details of a horrific events can lead to a phenomenon called vicarious traumatization -- you're so connected to a tragedy that you feel emotional trauma as if you'd been directly involved.

To those of us in the trauma biz, this is not a particularly surprising phenomenon. In fact, it's so accepted that people hearing about trauma can themselves be traumatized that every training or workshop you go to through the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation includes a warning about the level of distress you can expect to experience. I don't know anyone who has been to significant numbers of these things (including myself) who hasn't found themselves unexpectedly upset by a role play or case study. Jurors have it worse, because they aren't just pretending something happened -- it really did.

What should we call what is going on with these jurors? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV,TR) is the bible by which mental illness is diagnosed. As the article states, these jurors have some of the symptoms of PTSD -- some of them may have all of them. has two relevant diagnoses listed as "official" psychological disorders that occur following trauma. But do they have PTSD?

By current standards, they can't. In order to have PTSD, the person must have

experienced, witnessed or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others.

Most (but not all) diagnosticians would say that being on the jury in a grisly murder trial does not meet the threshold of being "confronted" with the event.

It just so happens, however, that the DSM is undergoing revision as we speak. The proposed guidelines for PTSD in the DSM-V define traumatic exposure as follows:

The person was exposed to one or more of the following event(s): death or threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violation, in one or more of the following ways:

1. Experiencing the event(s) him/herself
   
2. Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as they occurred to others
   
3. Learning that the event(s) occurred to a close relative or close friend; in such cases, the actual or threatened death must have been violent or accidental
   
4. Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the event(s) (e.g., first responders collecting body parts; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse); this does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work related.
   

The jurors would most likely come under #4 in this definition. Their work, for the duration of their jury duty, is serving on the jury. They experience repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the murders. When the new manual comes out, they'll be eligible for a PTSD diagnosis.

This raises two important points. First of all, it's absurd to think that what actually is going on for these people will miraculously change because a new book is published. This is somewhat like deciding that in order to be diagnosed with a cold, you now have to have a stuffy nose and a cough, whereas before you just needed the nose. Unlike a virus, bacterial infection or broken bone, there is no way to objectively define a mental illness. We classify disorders by symptoms, and every now and then we decide to reclassify. We pretend we're defining an actual thing, but really we're just describing what we see in people that have the thing.

The second, and perhaps more important point, is that most of these jurors will not have PTSD under the new definition, either. In addition to describing the symptoms and the definition of traumatic exposure, both the old and new guidelines require that the person experience

clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. 

This would mean that, for an extended period of time, their symptoms significantly interfere with their ability to love, work, have friends, care for children, etc. Thankfully, even those with symptoms will mostly not reach this threshold.

Just because they don't and won't have PTSD, however, doesn't mean they don't need or deserve support. One of the most helpful things courts could do is, following a grisly trial, sit the jury down and tell them they may have a rough time for a while. That way, if and when the symptoms come, people won't add thinking they're going crazy to their stress. I think it's the least we can do for those whose misfortune was simply to be civic-minded and conscientious enough to show up for jury duty, and fair enough to be chosen to hear the case.

In my household, we talk about two kinds of severe weather warnings: Mr. Brown warnings and Parcheesi board warnings. Mr. Brown warnings are for severe thunderstorms, a reference to the Dr. Seuss book Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? which says, "Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown is a wonder. Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown makes thunder." Parcheesi warnings are for tornadoes. These come from something I'm relatively sure my sister made up (although she will correct me if I'm wrong). Right before Hurricane Bob was due to hit New England in the early 1990's, she said, "Hang onto your Parcheesi boards. It's gonna blow."

Last weekend, we had a major family event on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, all of the out of town guests were invited for brunch, and a bunch of them stayed throughout the day. There were 14 people at my house. About midday, we learned that our area was under a tornado watch. This is not such a big deal in Southeast Michigan. It happens pretty frequently, and doesn't usually progress to a tornado warning. Even when it does, however, we don't get too upset. While tornadoes are not unheard of in this neck of the woods, the number of warnings far outstrips the number of actual tornadoes, so we have a plan and a safe room in the basement, but we try to keep things fairly calm. My husband and I discussed the fact that our usual safe room won't hold 14 people, and decided that the room next to it is almost as safe and we would use that if necessary.

A little after 5 PM on Sunday, a Parcheesi warning was issued for our county. We are on the eastern end, so we knew we had some time. I calmly invited our guests to join us in our luxurious basement, bring something to do, and carry down a chair if they preferred not to sit on the floor. At my sister-in-law's request, we brought down a guitar, and for the next hour we all sat around, noses in computers and cell phones, while my mom, my daughter and I passed the guitar around and led the group in various folk songs. A good time was had by all.

When it was over and everyone had posted about it on Facebook, I was somewhat taken aback by the comments we got from friends and family elsewhere. "Was it scary?" "That's disturbing." "How horrible." My sister-in-law praised my calmness, and said she was handling the panic, quietly, for all of us. I explained that I preferred to save my panic for when a tornado actually hits our house.

The bulk of these visiting relations are from Massachusetts, where I grew up. In the 17 years I lived there full time, I can remember no more than three tornado warnings. We would go down to the basement and wait it out, and I remember distinctly one time asking schoolmates what they had done during a warning and them saying things like, "We just hung out and hoped a tornado didn't come." They had no plan at all.

Last night, however, the central and western parts of Massachusetts were slammed by tornadoes, causing major damage in 19 or 20 towns. At least four people died. My family, living as they do in the eastern part of the state, just got a spectacular lightning show.

Meanwhile, in Missouri last week, reports indicate that a lot of people didn't take cover during the Tornado that hit Joplin until they could see the tornado bearing down on them. The sirens go off so often around there, people don't always pay attention anymore.

This is the difficulty of disaster warning systems. You want a system that people will pay attention to and that warns of any disaster that is actually going to hit. But these two goals can be at odds. Any system that catches all the tornadoes that actually hit will also catch a lot of storms that could produce tornadoes but don't. And as long as that's the case, people in areas where those storms are fairly common will not see a tornado warning as being sufficient reason to take cover. Meanwhile, people in areas where such a thing is very unusual will take it seriously, but won't have a plan because they generally don't need one. Locations like ours, in fact, are in some ways ideal. We get enough warnings that we have a plan, but not so many that we don't take it seriously.

You've heard me say many times in this space that we live our lives by
what is likely, not what is possible. We take risks all day long based on the probability that something bad will happen to us, how bad that thing would be, and how disruptive it is to our lives to not take those risks. If a tornado hits near you, it's easy to say, in hindsight, you should have taken cover. It's not as easy to say, for someone else, that taking cover every time the warning goes out is always the absolute right thing to do. It is always the safe thing to do, but "right" depends on how much of a pain it is and how likely the tornado is to actually hit where you are, so everyone will come to his or her own conclusions.

In my household, however, when the siren goes off or the warning comes onto the radio or TV, we'll continue to hold onto our Parcheesis boards. Thanks for asking.